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Identity Disorder: May One Hide His Jewishness to Save His Life?
Adapted from the writings of Dayan Yitzhak Grossman
December 4, 2025
The Associated Press reports:
A Gustav Klimt portrait painting that helped save the life of its Jewish subject during the Holocaust sold Tuesday for $236.4 million, a record for a modern art piece.
Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” sold after a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s in New York…
The 6-foot-tall (1.8-meter-tall) portrait, painted over three years between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of one of Vienna’s wealthiest families adorned in an East Asian emperor’s cloak. It is one of two full-length portraits by the Austrian artist that remain privately owned. The work was kept separate from other Klimt paintings that burned in a fire at an Austrian castle.
The colorful painting depicts the Lederer family’s life of luxury before Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Nazis looted the Lederer art collection, leaving only the family portraits, which were considered “too Jewish” to be worth stealing, according to the National Gallery of Canada, where the painting was previously on loan.
In an attempt to save herself, Elisabeth Lederer made up a story that Klimt, who was not Jewish and died in 1918, was her father. It helped that the artist spent years working meticulously on her portrait.
With help from her former brother-in-law, a high-ranking Nazi official, she convinced the Nazis to give her a document stating that she descended from Klimt. That allowed her to remain safely in Vienna until she died of an illness in 1944.[1]
As we discussed several months ago in this forum, it is prohibited to unambiguously profess being an idolater even in order to save one’s life, but an ambiguous statement that can be interpreted as such a profession but is not intended that way by the professor is permitted in certain circumstances.[2]
R’ Efraim Oshry was a distinguished Lithuanian posek, a talmid and assistant of R’ Avraham Dov Kahana Shapiro, the great rav of Kovno and author of Dvar Avraham, who appointed him to answer sheilos in the Kovno Ghetto when he became too ill to do so himself. After surviving the Holocaust, he published volumes of teshuvos addressing situations that its horrors occasioned, including various scenarios involving denying one’s Jewishness and passing as a non-Jew in order to survive. This article and a follow-up survey his teshuvos on the topic as well as various other discussions thereof.
Certificates of conversion
Rav Oshry relates:
One the first of Nisan 5702 (1942), I was asked in the Kovno Ghetto whether a person is permitted to save himself by purchasing a certificate of conversion to Christianity, through which he will be able to flee to the forests and join the partisans.
In a relatively brief analysis, he forbids it as an unambiguous profession of Christianity. The teshuvah concludes:
We return to the din that there is no dispensation whatsoever in our case to acquire a certificate of conversion to Christianity and apostasy, even if he thinks that through this he will succeed in being saved. Rather, it is a mitzvah to sanctify the Name of Hashem, as it says, “and I will be sanctified in the midst of Bnei Yisrael.”[3],[4]
Identity documents
In another teshuvah, Rav Oshry addresses someone who found refuge in a non-Jewish home and acquired documents identifying him and his family as non-Jews from birth. The man was concerned that despite never having actually used the documents, perhaps just acquiring them constituted a repudiation of his Jewishness, requiring him, as a repentant apostate, to immerse in a mikveh and formally accept Yahadus.[5]
Rav Oshry takes for granted that proffering the ID would indeed be forbidden, but because his correspondent never did so, Rav Oshry concludes that he is not considered as having apostatized, particularly since he had fully maintained his observance, including tfillin, Shabbos, and kashrus.[6]
R’ Menashe Klein, however, vehemently rebuts Rav Oshry’s basic assumption that representing oneself as a non-Jew via false identification is prohibited, asserting that the practice was quite common even among great and righteous men:
In my humble opinion, not only is there no prohibition to make the identity document, on the contrary, it is a mitzvah. For in the time of the great war, when danger hovered over everyone, he performed a great mitzvah to save himself and all the family he could from the hands of the evildoers, and thousands of Jews were saved in this manner then and previously, and no one opened his mouth chas veshalom to challenge this. And even many gedolei Yisrael and righteous men were saved in this manner, as is known to everyone, and that which is widely known does not require proof…Even if the non-Jews came and asked for his papers, and he showed them papers of a non-Jew, there is nevertheless no prohibition in this, in my humble opinion, as long as he did not say anything to them and only showed them non-Jewish papers.[7]
Rav Klein proceeds to argue that displaying such a document is equivalent to someone wearing non-Jewish clothing for protection, which is permitted, because he is not explicitly declaring himself not to be Jewish.[8] R’ Yitzchak Zilberstein, too, inclines to the view that showing a passport that represents its holder as a non-Jew, absent a verbal declaration to that effect, is permitted. (He is uncertain whether a Jew would be permitted to carry out the forgery, because perhaps we say that ksivah kedibur—writing is the equivalent of speaking).[9] Indeed, in a teshuvah about a Jew buying a non-Jew’s passport, replacing the photo with his own, and using it to pass as a non-Jew, Rav Oshry himself considers the possibility that showing such a passport is no worse than physical disguise and is permitted. But he is unsure of this, suggesting that displaying the document might constitute an act of denying one’s Jewishness. He is confident, though, that acquiring the passport is permitted, because the seller understands that the buyer is doing so as a stratagem to save himself rather than as a declaration that false gods are real.[10]
R’ Ovadia Hadaya was also asked about such false documents, but curiously, unlike Rav Oshry, Rav Klein, and Rav Zilberstein, who discuss the permissibility of acquiring, creating, and proffering such documents, Rav Hadaya addresses only the problem of verbally declaring oneself to be a non-Jew in order to procure them. He rules that such a declaration is prohibited unless it can be made using ambiguous language.[11]
[1]Hannah Schoenbaum. Gustav Klimt portrait that spared its subject from Nazis breaks modern art record with $236M sale. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/golden-toilet-cattelan-auction-sothebys-ef4c0b1ccb2841c078ff59756fe6d7b2.
[2]Mean Deviation: When You Don’t Mean What They Mean. Apr. 10, 2025.
[4]Shu”t Mima’amakim cheilek 1 siman 15.
[5]See Nimukei Yosef Yevamos perek 4 at the beginning of p. 16b in Rif pagination; Trumas Hadeshen cheilek 1 siman 86; Hagahos HaRama to Shulchan Aruch Y.D. 268:12.
[6]Shu”t Mima’amakim cheilek 4 siman 12. Cf. R’ Efraim Kachalon, Hastaras HaYahadus Be’eis Hashoah Hanora’ah, Yarchon Haotzar, gilyon 43 (Av 5780) anaf 8 pp. 136-37.
[7]Shu”t Mishneh Halachos cheilek 9 siman 170.
[9]Chashukei Chemed Avodah Zarah 19a p. 162.
[10]Divrei Efraim, Kuntres Meieimek Habacha, she’eilah 3.
[11]Shu”t Yaskil Avdi cheilek 6 Y.D. siman 1 osios 6-7 Cf. Rav Kachalon ibid. os 9 p. 137.
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